Little Late on the Blog Post but Rare Pair Time! · 10:52am May 24th
Heartfelt Hooficures by @Marenlicious on Twitter and Named/Commissioned by Yours Truly!
So annoying to fix the URL typos in x.com to say Twitter. Anyway...
Howdy everyone! This is gonna be a short one, but in case you missed it, I published a G5 fic for May Pairings 2024! This was an interesting write with so much researching going into it. I knew nothing about salons or African hair styles, but thanks to my friend and co-worker, I now know more about 4a-4c hair and styling it than my own. If you were glance over my shoulder at my tabs when I was writing the pertinent scene it applies to, you would've thought I was about to make a terrible hairstyle mistake. Even watching a 22 minute video on how to braid cornrows despite not going with that style of hair in the end. Mostly out of necessity since Jazz doesn't have fingers to manipulate three stands of hair at once.
Either way, I am very proud of how this one turned out, even if I feel it was a little fast pacing-wise, but that's mostly the fault of the source material. The perils of following the G5 story line outside of one little change is that you adhere to source material which can be... painful. Look, I think it's okay to say that I appreciate this new generation of ponies. Their designs are great, the components are all there for a good story, and I think it has a clearer moral compass than G4 does. That being said, going through the transcripts and episode for research and having to keep my brain on to absorb how it's written for characterization? Pure psychic damage at times. Example? Time for some controversy! Skip to 1:44. The timestamp didn't work.
Everything before this is great, though it's also because Oplaine's VA can weave gold from most any garbage line with her performance. Then, we get to one of the most heart-wrenching and memorable moments of the series... at least in screenshot form, but when its played?
Misty: [sighs] For somepony made of fire, I've never met a heart so cold. [sobbing for 2 seconds]
There's writing for kids, there's talking down to them, and then there's not respecting their intelligence. It's a hack line that undermines her breakdown and then only having her cry for all of two seconds in a way that almost feels disconnected from the line. It's bad. Plain bad. Awful. It's so bad that I would assume the crying was a last minute addition for how poorly the line is directed leading into it.
The acting is off as well. Whoever decided on the pacing of that 11 seconds was either on an insane time crunch to get it rushed out the door or the writers had already been gone for months. Such a bad edit.
What Rego Assumes Happened
- Original Take: "For somepony made of fire, I've never met a heart so cold."
- Animators, much later after fighting with management: We should make her cry.
- Rushed Creative Lead at the last minute: *Texts VA to record herself crying with no context*
It's so frustrating because there is so much to love about G5, but bad writing and edits are peppered throughout. At least when G4 fell on its face hard, it had the decency to be bad the entire episode rather than brief moments that otherwise sour a stellar moment.
In other news, started writing Chapter 22 of Unchanging Truths. Not very deep into it, but I've got a lot going on right now. Also, I am still getting everything ready to show you all from Ponycon. I am waiting for one thing to come in the mail before I start doing photos. I commissioned 2 (actually 3, but I forgot to tell the artist the pony species, so I am not showing that one) artworks. One from Maren up above and down here, we have Sauna Summers from Electro Swing!
Canon Sauna Summers Depiction by Saphy Moon.
I have a much higher quality 400 DPI scan of this image, but I gave that scan to Saphy Moon for her Patreon if she wanted since she posts convention sketches on there. I think she put it up there? Not sure. As far as the story she's from, I am actually going to go back and edit her description to change it from the afro I wrote her with to this. It looks more like the real photo of Donna Summer anyway.
Electro Swing and Sauna Summer might be long gone, but a thing I started playing to unwind is Pony.Town. And guess who's alive and kickin' there?
Feel free to say hi if you see me walking around as her or Rego.
Anyway, that's all I've got. Can't wait to show you all the stuff from Ponycon. Mostly just gonna be merch and plushie tables. We weren't allowed to take photos of the venues, but there's probably plenty of posts about it you can find on Twitter.
See you in the next blog!
- Rego
I relate pretty hard to this, as I have had quite a few really solid ideas for G5 fics, but this has been a major obstacle to trying to get any of them going. And I don’t mean fearing having to rewatch said parts for research. I have done it, and they invariably kill the enthusiasm. It’s a real shame, though I suppose when I’m doing it on my lonesome, it easier to pack it in than you and your handful of regular pre-readers and editors.
I’m a little confused what exactly it is you find problematic about that moment. At first you say it’s how the line is written, then it’s merely how it’s acted. Then, it’s that the line is fine but the decisions to add it two seconds of poorly voice directed crying that then cuts away to Mane 5 is what kills it. That last one is where I personally stand.
Honestly, I think the line as written is one of the better ones around in G5, relative to its average quality, even if the visual pacing and execution is an absolute hack job. Sure, the viewer knows it already, but it’s a kids’ cartoon, that’s a given, and relative to the circular dialogue that’s super repetitive most of the generation uses, it is succinct and thus all the more powerful. I suspect you saying “controversy” means you are aware most folks like that ending moment more than nearly the whole episode, though.
It’s certainly no worse than the hammy Kids’ Cartoon Villain 101 stuff Opaline was spouting just prior. I agree her voice actress is giving it her all, though the limitations of the animation style, and how much it needs more nuanced character animation and editing that isn’t so broken (seriously, the shot assembly reads like there’s a cut one every 10 seconds, or throat they were shuffled around in order, it’s that schizophrenic) really undermines said villain moment.
And even then, it plays better here in isolation than in practice, coming after 18 mins of dragon napping faffing about and Idiot Ball searching.
But yeah, that’s the real frustrating thing about G5: there was so much potential there in the root elements of MYM’s story. But the constant bad decisions are everywhere in every facet, and intercut so deeply with the bits like this that had great potential.
And said issues are present enough that while there is a lot of fanfic potential, I fully agree, it does require playing a little fast-and-loose with canon accuracy. Yes, even after we just ignore TYT (which contradicts MYM itself so much, we might as well consider it a different timeline anyway).
This was certainly true more often than not, though there are plenty of instances of it fumbling in a similar manner to how this moment did. They just feel different to watch owing to the visuals, writing and audio being done according to a totally different set of guidelines and wavelengths.
5782617 (Edited in, I'm so tired today...)
If you caught the blog earlier, I accidentally hit the submit button rather than the preview button and had a minor panic around this part. I had a "This Blog is Under Construction" message for about 10-20 minutes as I rushed to get to the end of the blog. I edited again to make it a little more clear in the blog post.
In my view, it's overselling it. The context of the narrative up to this point has been showing us exactly this. Perhaps if they did a few more takes and redid the entire scene to let it breathe, then maybe. For me, this comes off as reinforcing something the audience knows extremely well and doing so it a hot and cold metaphor that just feels so forced since it's talking directly to the audience.
I know she's pondered aloud in other places, and I accept that because it's helped clear up what her thoughts are. Like when she says the thing about the dragonfire and hoping it's enough at the beginning of the clip. That helps cue the audience into it. After seeing the level of abuse, fear, and manipulation that played out in the show prior to this scene, it's so unnecessary that it's distracting. If she was saying that line to another character, that'd be one thing. Saying it for the sake of the audience? I do firmly believe that kids would've been able to catch onto what was bothering her if she just broke down and cried for 10 seconds, alone, with no one around to comfort her as the camera slowly backs away in ever-widening shots to show how small she is in the moment.
Honestly? Because I care so much about setting up emotive moments, this might not be objectively the worst thing in MYM, I think that honor goes to the entire fries scene in Bridlewoodstock, but for me specifically, that line Misty says in that context is the absolute worst line in the show.
You'll notice the names appearing in the prereader pool this time around are a little different. Jym is a fan of G5, so he was a big help, but the others were some friends on Discord that I asked for vibe checks. Scrib knew G5 and helped on some of the characterization, but Velvet was completely blind to G5 outside of the movie, I believe.
Yeah, but that's babies in media for you. Low-hanging fruit that only serves to waste time unless being used in very specific stories.
WARNING: Spoilers are hiding a rant against a character I despise.
I know I've said that you should pay attention to fan depictions of characters and separate them, but as for Sparky? Delete him or age him up and give him and make him an actual character instead of the deus ex machina machine he was in MYM. He was legitimately the biggest mistake in the show, and the only thing that makes the canon show worth watching to me is Misty's arc. I apologize for nothing. I might hate him about as much as Star Wars fans hate Jar Jar.
And I do hope you one day write a fic in G5. The space definitely needs more good fics from the material. Of course, if you're going to make anything longer than what I wrote, you'll probably need to AU it so you can pick and choose all the elements that are great and throw away... basically everything after the movie? Honestly, after going through my research phase, I actually like TYT better than MYM. It might be paced like an Old Spice commercial, but MYM feels like it can't focus for more than 5 minutes on any given storyline anyway. Plus, the 2D art really grew on me. I honestly love how Jazz looks in TYT's style, bean mouth and all.
static.wikia.nocookie.net/g5mlp/images/d/de/Jazz_TYT_ID.png
5782627
Eh, this blog looked pretty done to me at the time, ot cutoff or “Under Construction” message, meaning I think I came or it after you’d fixed all that anyway. Reading back over it now, I don’t see anything that leaps out as having changed from when I posted my comment (meaning it was all minor things).
Incidentally, you didn’t use the reply function, so I only saw this by checking back out of curiosity.
That’s what I mean when I say it as written. I’m in the position of having read A LOT of FiM scripts, plus many others in general, so I can confidently say that the script, past the dialogue, wouldn’t have said how long Misty was crying, or any details other than the bare minimum for Atomic Cartoons to flesh the shot out. So the scene “as written” gives no direct guidance as the pacing or visual direction. DHX was very good at filling in those blanks to let the visual and pacing execution plus the script, while a scene like this is basically doing the opposite, making it play as worse than it was written.
Tl;dr – my use of the phrase “as written” is meant far more literally than how most people perceive it, which is more akin to visualizing the storyboard of the scene.
Oh don’t get me wrong: as a visual storyteller, I 100% would have preferred something like this. But MYM quickly proved itself as a show with no confidence in its ability to hold viewer interest without near-constant dialogue from day 1, so that was never going to be on the cards. Even by this eight episode, I has written off anything nearly as sophisticated like that as a lost cause.
No, I’d believe that, yeah. I once edited on a fic of PaulAsaran’s that was a one-shot spin-off of his Bulletproof Heart series despite never having read it. One can help with such things even without character/setting familiarity.
I mean, I’m in total agreement, and I think many fans are too. A character being a prop yet always being present will do that.
I mean, I already did, and it’s actually tied for my favourite fic of the six I’ve written.
It was when we only had the movie to go off of, granted. I was referring to G5 five that do incorporate elements thereafter.
But wanting to add more to a space that needs it is a key reason why the desire hasn’t burned away yet to do it again, yep.
Hard agree, and many of the better recent G5 fic’s I’ve read do this. That said, I’m such an obsessive planner that writing fics longer than a novelette like yours here is a long, arduous process for me anyway (still ticking away at a G4 novel-length adventure ponyfic, for one), so any G5 dabbling would be just one-shots.
Honestly, I agree with this more than you might expect. It’s tone makes I very hard to provide fan content inspiration (I fully think the background music, ADHD-addled stuff with the attention span of 90’s anime dub music, is the biggest liability), but as a viewing experience, it irritates me less.
Most characters created anew in MYM, other than Misty and Opaline as they were given extra time being major players, tend to look better in TYT as the staff didn’t have time to tweak their facial models to suit their unique design tweaks, a crucial step for CG characters that can’t just reuse a base model like in Flash-style cartoons. Posey is the worst of this, but even setting aside her having ears, Jazz is a clear case of someone who looks far better this way.
In general, other then the bean mouths not suiting the horse heads and the dancer legs for half the cast (just use the stocky legs Hitch and Izzy have for everyone!), I like a lot about the style. It is a webseries, make no mistake, not a cartoon with the level of visual sophistication of FiM, it it fully shows off how much more you can do on a shoestring budget in 2D animation. I think the manic pacing way it is used, and that background music, are major liabilities, but it’s got a lot that’s workable, long as no dramatic stakes are required (too day-glo for that).